Jekyll2017-04-09T03:32:24+00:00http://kyleshockey.info/Kyle ShockeyTechnical Difficulties2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:002016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00http://kyleshockey.info/technical-difficulties<p>Hello, friends. It’s been a while since my last dispatch. I thought I would take the time to get you up to speed and to talk about what’s coming next. A lot has changed both in my personal life and in the world around us. I hope to write a second post concerning the latter, but I have to think about what I want to say, how I want to say it, and whether I need to say it.</p>
<p>Since you last heard from this blog, I’ve cycled through a few jobs and moved up the East Coast to Boston. Right now I’m working as a tech project assistant for a music school where I am responsible for helping to implement a vendor discovery service and for taking on some cataloging responsibility for a permanent staff member’s term leave. I’m also working at a local public library’s reference desk 1-2 days a week on the side. While I was in DC, I was working part-time for a government agency focused on environmental investigation of inorganic chemical accidents. The big news, however, is that I will be moving back to Washington in 2017. I’ve taken a job as a Cataloging Librarian at the Library of Congress in the Music Division. I’m over the moon about this opportunity and I hope to do well once I get there. I’m also hoping that it will provide me the opportunity to engage more with you and others. I’m lucky enough to be presenting at MashCat 2017 in conjunction with ALA Midwinter in Atlanta in January; please let me know if you will be there. I cherish nothing more than the chance to come together with friends and get things done.</p>
<p>More to come. I hope this space continues to be lively for me in the coming months.</p>Hello, friends. It’s been a while since my last dispatch. I thought I would take the time to get you up to speed and to talk about what’s coming next. A lot has changed both in my personal life and in the world around us. I hope to write a second post concerning the latter, but I have to think about what I want to say, how I want to say it, and whether I need to say it.dh+me2016-03-28T00:00:00+00:002016-03-28T00:00:00+00:00http://kyleshockey.info/dh-me<p>I tweeted three days ago about a conversation with <a href="https://aszingarelli.wordpress.com/">Anna-Sophia Zingarelli-Sweet</a> which may later find life in some scholarly production and said the following about my relationship with the digital humanities:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I&#39;m not interested in how data helps me perform humanities research; I&#39;m interested in how humanities research helps me perform data work.</p>&mdash; kyle, metadata yokel (@kshockey04) <a href="https://twitter.com/kshockey04/status/712887177483526144">March 24, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>Some context: Though I am a metadataist/cataloger by trade right now, I am trained primarily as a humanities scholar with the specialties of historical musicology, media and cultural criticism, Frierian education, and critical theory. I largely thought my career would take me into humanities liaison librarianship. It may still. I’m in a conundrum not over whether to get a PhD, but what discipline/program to get it in when the time is right. You’d think I would be a natural fit in the digital humanities. However, the “Digital Humanities” has always felt like this foreign language I’d never be able to speak and that people (save <a href="http://ryanpatrickrandall.com/">Ryan Randall</a>) preach about without really making it relatable or understandable to people for whom DH would otherwise be a fit<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. DH really suffers from an identity crisis, in no small part because of the intersection of the humanities’ relationship with the neoliberal academy in a time of austerity and the precariousness of digital humanities research output within the magical economy of tenure-based promotion and advancement.</p>
<p>While DH supposedly is a <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/36">more collegial</a><sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">2</a></sup> corner of the academic community, I get the feeling it hasn’t rooted out the structural problems that come along with interdepartmental collaboration: money, recognition, labor division, and everything else that comes along with power imbalance in the academy. One of the problems that plagues librarianship, particularly those of us who do data work, is just how understaffed, underpaid, and overworked technical services departments are<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote">3</a></sup>. Couple that with the fact that we’re considered a critical service infrastructure on campuses robust enough to have research occur and you have a situation in which library workers do not have the opportunity to expertly evaluate, have a say in, or refuse to participate in a project<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote">4</a></sup>. Some places are fortunate enough to have a person or people dedicated to working on these kinds of things. More often these roles are enveloped in already existing job descriptions, which takes time and expert resources critical to the library’s functioning–catalog and database maintenance, significant backlogs, upgrades to linked data technologies, repository administration, electronic resource management–away from the library.</p>
<p>Let me be clear: this is not an attack on DH as a theory, methodology, subdiscipline, or whatever else. I am a person who hopes to do some of this kind of work down the road in my career. But the disciplinary and literature-based focus focus is on the humanities practitioner and the library is still seen as a tool: it is the server host, the research repository, the publisher, the editor, the tech help. What makes me uncomfortable with this relationship stems from an inability to be seen a practitioner in my own right<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote">5</a></sup>. Data-driven scholarship uses digital tools much like any other scholarly practitioner uses methodology. My work uses humanities methods to think and talk about things surrounding librarianship, the Semantic Web, metadata, labor, ethics, and social justice. I don’t fit in the <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/22">big tent</a> of a discipline is that concerned with enforcing epistemological boundaries of tool-building and text-based intellectual work<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote">6</a></sup>. The “core community” functions as a canon of humans, conferences, journals, and projects which is used to exclude both <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/35">new professionals</a> and those who cannot make digital tools<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote">7</a></sup>.</p>
<p>That’s really unfortunate, as I think such an insular approach drives away people who would otherwise be excellent contributors. Another disclaimer: I know that not all DH practitioners are the kind I talk about above. What concerns me is that many of the “big names” are doing the academic turf war performance. That never ends well for anyone. In an upcoming piece, I hope to talk more about what it means to be a scholar-practitioner from the library side of digital humanities collaboration.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Tom Scheinfeldt <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/18">argues</a> for considering an approach to digital humanities that has room for methodological and theoretical approaches to humanist inquiry as an answer to the oft asked question of purpose in humanities research. I want to address this argument in its entirety at a later date, but for this note I want to address that the question posed in this kind of disciplinary reflection feels like the wrong question. The first feedback I got in graduate school about conceptualizing humanities projects: “so what?”&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Scheinfeldt again. You know who else is considered nice in the academy? You know who else is characterized by “methodology rather than theory?” Librarians. nb: Methodological questions are hardly easier resolved compared to theoretical ones &amp; those debates are hardly nice. Ask social scientists. (No, you’re not that different.)&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>This is not to denigrate adjunctification, which plagues all of us. I find that most faculty know nothing about the labor relations and funding of their libraries.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4">
<p>In other words: we do not get license to be the experts and professionals we were trained or hired to be.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:5">
<p>I won’t argue when someone says LIS puts out a lot of bad research because it does. But that does not negate the fact that many of us are trained at the graduate level in some other discipline and our cross-disciplinary work often touches the domain of our work inside the library. The history of librarianship is largely borne out in LIS journals and monograph publications, but is history in both the macro- and microanalytical sense. It’s still the humanities and it is just one example.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:5" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:6">
<p>Svensson’s own words: “One central question is whether the tent can naturally be taken to include critical work construing the digital as an object of inquiry rather than as a tool.” Largely I still believe not, but I am a newcomer. In fact, some of my work would critique the languages and technologies that these tools are built on. Criticizing core epistemology has not worked out well for me yet in my young career.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:6" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:7">
<p>Canons are often intellectual violence. <a href="http://critlib.org/">#critlib</a> struggles with this constantly as there are calls from inside and outside the community–a largely nebulous concept for how #critlib actually functions–to define epistemological and value boundaries through construction of a core text canon and official value statement. To do so would be disingenuous to something that attempts Svensson’s “meeting zone”, though critics have already enforced the epistemological bounds and core text canon (read: continental philosophers, which is so far from true) through the strawman arguments upon which their critiques are founded.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:7" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>I tweeted three days ago about a conversation with Anna-Sophia Zingarelli-Sweet which may later find life in some scholarly production and said the following about my relationship with the digital humanities:Linked Data 2: The Cataloger Strikes Back2016-03-26T00:00:00+00:002016-03-26T00:00:00+00:00http://kyleshockey.info/linked-data-2<p>This post is a follow up to my last, <a href="/2016/03/22/wherefore-linked-data.html">“Wherefore art thou, linked data?”</a></p>
<p>Friend of the blog <a href="http://yobj.net/">Becky Yoose</a> alerted me to the existence of other friend of the blog <a href="https://twitter.com/no_reply">Tom Johnson</a>’s talk from Semantic Web in Libraries, 2015. I suggest you watch it if you can speak linked data or application development:</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aLjcTF0Lwb0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>When I was talking with Tom on Twitter and still in the headspace of the last note, something clicked. While I made the assertion that linked data technologists in general talk past catalogers and that the idea that the graph must usurp the record is invalid, I missed something.</p>
<p>In Tom’s words: “Graphs are mathematical objects.” This may be a large cause of the semantic spat between linked data technologists and library metadataists and catalogers. The RDF graph generated by the series of assertions about a particular thing is a surrogate of the thing we are describing, but not in the same way that a bibliographic record is. The oversimplified thesis I am attempting to put forth: linked data graphs are a human-readable abstraction of computer computation whereas the bibliographic record is a human-readable abstraction of an intellectual manifestation. At the end of the day, it’s all the same metadata insofar as the abstractions are semantically equivalent in representating the same real object. In an epistemological sense, though, they are serving <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMalvNeJFLk">two different and equally important</a> functions. The ~catalog of the future!~ must incorporate both the graph and the record in order to be a functioning system of human-computer interaction that achieves the catalog’s aims.</p>
<p>The graph doesn’t really help people who are not technologists. This point is absolutely critical for linked data technologists to understand. The graph does not represent human semantics. It represents mathematical equations that can be imbued with human meaning in a very specific predicate logical sense. These mathematical equations are how we work as metadataists and technologists, yes. They are critical to the system, yes. They are not the whole system. Like Tom’s example above, the simplest way to represent this to people who do not work with linked data on a regular basis is the subject-predicate-object construction.</p>
<h4 id="assertion-set-1-of-object-x-using-dublin-core-terms">Assertion set 1 of object x, using Dublin Core terms</h4>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:title&gt; &lt;Graphs, Records, and Transmission&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:creator&gt; &lt;Shockey, Kyle&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:subject&gt; &lt;Johnson, Tom&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:subject&gt; &lt;linked data&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:date&gt; &lt;2015-03-26&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:type&gt; &lt;blog post&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:description&gt; &lt;a blog post about graphs and records&gt;
</code></pre>
</div>
<p>This is, of course, a very skeleton description of this very web page<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. Let’s say I wanted to edit it to be more representative. I come out with the following:</p>
<h4 id="assertion-set-2-of-object-x">Assertion set 2 of object x</h4>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:title&gt; &lt;&lt;Graphs, Records, and Transmission&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:creator&gt; &lt;Shockey, Kyle, 1990-&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:subject&gt; &lt;linked data&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:subject&gt; &lt;documentation&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:subject&gt; &lt;machine-readable bibliographic records&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:date&gt; &lt;2016-03-26&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:type&gt; &lt;blog post&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:description&gt; &lt;a blog post about graphs and records&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:references&gt; &lt;Johnson, Tom&gt;
</code></pre>
</div>
<p>Tom makes an important point that pertains to these two graphs and their metaphysical being: <strong>they are two different graphs.</strong> Unlike the bibliographic record model that MARC uses which has a definite single master record with a history of edits, the documents above are two completely different records in linked data world. Having these two separate graphs allows me to make a mathematical comparison of the changes, represented below with ++ and – :</p>
<h4 id="mathematical-comparison-between-assertion-sets-1-and-2">Mathematical comparison between assertion sets 1 and 2</h4>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:title&gt; &lt;Graphs, Records, and Transmission&gt;
-- &lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:creator&gt; &lt;Shockey, Kyle&gt;
++ &lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:creator&gt; &lt;Shockey, Kyle, 1990-&gt;
-- &lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:subject&gt; &lt;Johnson, Tom&gt;
++ &lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:references&gt; &lt;Johnson, Tom&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:subject&gt; &lt;linked data&gt;
++ &lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:subject&gt; &lt;documentation&gt;
++ &lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:subject&gt; &lt;machine-readable bibliographic records&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:date&gt; &lt;2016-03-26&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:type&gt; &lt;blog post&gt;
&lt;x&gt; &lt;dc:description&gt; &lt;a blog post about graphs and records&gt;
</code></pre>
</div>
<p>But that is not how representation of an object works epistemologically in the human world. We know that the object is still the same object and that the human meaning of the metadata was edited, not replaced. MARC metadata has a method for version control of a master record<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">2</a></sup>: the 040 field.</p>
<p><code class="highlighter-rouge">040 __ IUL $b eng $e rda $c IUL $d IJZ $d EAU $d PUL $d DLC</code></p>
<p>In human words: Indiana University (IUL) transcribed ($c) Indiana University’s cataloging (blank node, or $a), which was in turn edited ($d) by Indiana Archives of Traditional Music (IJZ), American University (EAU), Princeton University (PUL), and the Library of Congress (DLC). The record is transcribed in the English language ($b eng) and uses the RDA description convention ($e rda).</p>
<p>Or: The record has existed in 5 iterations, including the current one. That isn’t a statement you can make about graphs. It literally does not compute, with the possible exception of the RDF Source (discussed in the video). This is the disconnect between graphs and records that require both intellectual models to exist in order to get from computer computation to human meaning-making. The gap between these two abstract models is generally bridged by front-end programming–the discovery layer of the OPAC, etc<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote">3</a></sup>. A handy chart:</p>
<p>computer computation – representative graph – programming black magic – bibliographic record – human understanding</p>
<p>It’s not so linear or straightforward, but I am attempting to come up with something better through formal research. This explication I’ve put forth also requires catalogers to know something of equal importance: a MARC record does not automatically equal a bibliographic record. MARC is a data standard and a markup language. I think many catalogers who do not necessarily think about their craft in a meta sense have never unpacked the intellectual shortcut that causes “bibliographic record” to equal “MARC record.” If you see the chart above, it fits MARC just as much as it fits linked data. The representative “graph” in this case is your MARC record. The semantic meaning in MARC for a non-specialist is explicated only after the computer computation takes the representative graph (<a href="http://www.librarian.net/talks/marcmetadata/SerialMARCrecord.gif" target="_blank">this thing</a>) through the programming black magic to make the thing you see on the OPAC display (i.e. the bibliographic record).</p>
<p>With this chart, I can say again: the only difference between the two with regard to the library catalog is the first (and secondarily the third) node. Building semantics in linked data dramatically shifts the concept of computer programming, but has little to no effect on bibliographic representation except for decentralizing the database. The record and the graph are both useful models for understanding metadata but they represent two completely different things in the process of bibliographic representation automation. With this knowledge, we can build the big tent and get linked data technologists and library catalogers and metadataists to talk to each other without denigrating the other’s work.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>I am of course not using all of these elements with proper formality. This is a proof of concept.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Not a great one, since it only records literals and doesn’t actually have the functionality to revert to a previous form of record.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>This kind of programming is too out of my depth for me to be able to make any other sort of meaningful statement about this kind of bridging.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>This post is a follow up to my last, “Wherefore art thou, linked data?”Wherefore art thou, linked data?2016-03-22T00:00:00+00:002016-03-22T00:00:00+00:00http://kyleshockey.info/wherefore-linked-data<p>Listen up, <a href="http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2016/02/roy-tennant-digital-libraries/broken-furniture-and-blood-on-the-floor/">preachers of linked data in libraries</a>:</p>
<p><strong>The record is not going away. It absolutely should not go away.</strong></p>
<p>In other words:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This is good, but re: &quot;shackles,&quot; we now have <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/SHACL?src=hash">#SHACL</a>. Links must be bundled/bounded in some way or other. <a href="https://twitter.com/rtennant">@rtennant</a> <a href="https://t.co/OVsjZiMMjb">https://t.co/OVsjZiMMjb</a></p>&mdash; Tim Thompson (@timathom) <a href="https://twitter.com/timathom/status/712291910061318145">March 22, 2016</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/kshockey04">@kshockey04</a> I often feel like metadata creators and library technologists are talking past each other.</p>&mdash; Erin Leach (@erinaleach) <a href="https://twitter.com/erinaleach/status/712291193682526209">March 22, 2016</a></blockquote>
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<p>You keep saying it is and all that means is you have no concept of the history of documentation<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. You cannot see the forest for its trees (or the links for their semantic meaning). You are talking past library technologists and metadata workers and catalogers and you are wrong<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">2</a></sup>. You are wrong and you are slowing the adaption of linked data technologies in libraries just as much as those who stick to old practices of documentation for their own convenience. For the sake of both parties, we need to clear things up.</p>
<h1 id="the-library-and-documentation">The Library and Documentation</h1>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I still don&#39;t get it. Linked data is like physics to me: brain can&#39;t won&#39;t don&#39;t. <a href="https://t.co/jueoM57ukP">https://t.co/jueoM57ukP</a></p>&mdash; Emily Drabinski (@edrabinski) <a href="https://twitter.com/edrabinski/status/712287428002840576">March 22, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p><br />
<a href="http://experiment.worldcat.org/entity/work/data/2406166">I mean, does this make any sense to you?</a> Exactly.</p>
<p>That some of my most intelligent librarian friends “don’t get it” is not an indictment of them. The document and its metadata have been the history of our profession as long as there has been a profession. Documentation practices that have existed and exist today exist for very thoughtful, deliberate, and intentional reasons. Linked data and the bibliographic record exist to do some of the same things: to describe a thing by making statements about its existence, to gather disparate types of information about a single thing into one place for human readability, and to describe the relationships between different things. One uses a language made for reading punchcards in the 1960s and one takes advantage of the hypertext transfer protocol. Each does other things–MARC records are used for inventory, while linked data has other applications that non-library technologists use for their projects. That said, both live on the shoulders of giants. Consider the bibliographic workform of the original MARC standard–its form and content built on already existing data and documentation standards (card catalog) that were improved over the previous 75 or so years<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote">3</a></sup>. The benefits of the MARC bibliographic workform included internal inventory and the ability to disseminate a workform to other libraries that held the same book. Likewise, in the library context (and in corporate and other contexts as well), linked data relies on making a surrogate entity for any and all data that can be described out of existing data and data structures. Chief among these structures include, golly gee, the <a href="http://id.loc.gov/">Library of Congress authority files</a>, the <a href="https://viaf.org">Virtual International Authority File</a>, and other national bibliographic agencies’ bibliographic and authority data, as well as popular metadata records written in <a href="http://dublincore.org/">Dublin Core</a> and <a href="http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/">MODS</a>. All of these projects are more or less an integral part of library land and have at their founding or early inception heavy feedback from library technologists.</p>
<p>Let me say this again, in another paragraph: you are standing on the shoulders of library data and documentation practices, linked data practitioners. There is no and, but, &amp; or about it.</p>
<h1 id="a-linked-data-primer">A Linked Data Primer</h1>
<p>Friend of the blog Ruth Tillman recently wrote a pretty dang good overview of <a href="http://ruthtillman.com/introduction-rdf-librarians-metadata/">RDF &amp; linked data for metadata librarians</a> that tackles this subject in depth, so defer to that document if you don’t know what I mean with some terms in the next section.</p>
<p>Linked data takes advantage of web technologies to provide granular semantic meaning to data and the relationships between data that is computer-readable. It’s called linked because it primarily uses the hypertext transfer protocol’s ability to create links between not geographically or digitally proximate documents<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote">4</a></sup>. The major difference between something like html and a linked data framework like RDF is what the computer is able to infer from the construction of the data. If I was to link to friend of the blog <a href="http://www.emilydrabinski.com/">Emily Drabinski’s website</a>, a computer infers the following:</p>
<p><code class="highlighter-rouge">The literal string "Emily Drabinski's website," when clicked on, should resolve to the domain "http://www.emilydrabinski.com"</code></p>
<p>What the semantic web (the new concept of the web that is built on linked data technology) allows you to do is imbue meaning into that statement. You might want to know, for example, who Emily Drabinski is, whether or not this is the same Emily Drabinski that the web domain in the link refers to, and what Emily Drabinski’s website is about. Using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic">first-order logical</a> statements in the form of triples, linked data can model (and presumably in the future visualize)<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote">5</a></sup> more meaningful relationships than previous iterations of markup language. Ruth’s primer has a pretty good chart for cognitive procession from RDF as a conceptual model to the actual layout of a triple, so I won’t duplicate that. What I will illustrate here is how meaning is imbued. Each triple is considered a semantic statement and they can be built upon each other in a network. To understand the statements, you should know that each triple is expressed in the same order: subject-object-predicate. In other words: the subject has a value (the predicate) which is defined by the object. The following is a set of triples about Emily’s website in a format called N-Triples<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote">6</a></sup>:</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Subject</th>
<th>Predicate</th>
<th>Object</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><a href="http://www.emilydrabinski.com/">http://www.emilydrabinski.com/</a></td>
<td><a href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator">http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator</a></td>
<td><code class="highlighter-rouge">_:ed</code></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code class="highlighter-rouge">_:ed</code></td>
<td><a href="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#Literal">http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#Literal</a></td>
<td>Emily Drabinski</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code class="highlighter-rouge">_:ed</code></td>
<td><a href="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#sameAs">http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#sameAs</a></td>
<td><a href="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n2009061707.html">http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n2009061707.html</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code class="highlighter-rouge">_:ed</code></td>
<td><a href="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#sameAs">http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#sameAs</a></td>
<td><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3422445.Emily_Drabinski">http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3422445.Emily_Drabinski</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><code class="highlighter-rouge">_:ed</code></td>
<td><a href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/contributor">http://purl.org/dc/terms/contributor</a></td>
<td><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7867262-critical-library-instruction">http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7867262-critical-library-instruction</a></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote">7</a></sup> <sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8" class="footnote">8</a></sup> <sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote">9</a></sup></p>
<p>In plain English, this reads as the following:</p>
<p>(Emily Drabinski’s website url) has a creator: <code class="highlighter-rouge">:ed</code>.<br />
<code class="highlighter-rouge">:ed</code> is a literal string that reads “Emily Drabinski.”<br />
Emily Drabinski is the same as (Emily Drabinski’s LoC authority record).<br />
Emily Drabinski is the same as (Emily Drabinski’s Goodreads author page).<br />
Emily Drabinski is a contributor to the book <em>Critical Library Instruction</em>.</p>
<p>Because there are machine-readable definitions for all of the objects given, the machine can infer some other things that aren’t explicitly stated:</p>
<ol>
<li>Because Emily Drabinski and her authority file are the same AND Emily Drabinski and her Goodreads profile are the same, <em>Emily Drabinski’s authority file and Emily Drabinski’s Goodreads profile are the same.</em><sup id="fnref:10"><a href="#fn:10" class="footnote">10</a></sup></li>
<li>Emily Drabinski, all 3 instances of her, both authored her website and contributed (edited) the book <em>Critical Library Instruction.</em> This avoids the need to write (authority file) authored (website) and (authority file) edited book AND Goodreads profile authored website and Goodreads profile edited book–4 entire statements–like traditional binary computer programming. Look at how the computer works for you!</li>
</ol>
<p>Now, this is a very simple construction. I could say a lot more just because I know Emily professionally. To recap: the machine can now infer things about both Emily and the website and the book because we used defined resources to give meaning to the relationships rather than just a literal-to-resolved domain relationship without machine understanding.</p>
<h1 id="marc-and-static-data">MARC and static data</h1>
<p>Cool! we can make more meaningful statements about literally everything! That’s so much more useful than MARC!…But legacy data. What can we do with this?</p>
<p>Mr. Tennant seems to think we are highly misguided on this. We are not; we’re being library practical again. Here is a point by point breakdown:</p>
<ul>
<li>Links are only useful if they lead to an authoritative source that has something useful to provide.</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<p>We should have a whole website dedicated to translating library authority files to actionable links that reference sources like Wikipedia deliberately link to…oh. http://id.loc.gov/</p>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Simply translating bibliographic data from one format (MARC) to another (BIBFRAME or Schema.org, for example) does not create useful links.</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<p>The first problem with this point: BIBFRAME has been so thoroughly misguided from its founding documents that it literally models MARC data for linked data purposes. Look at that: a functional<sup id="fnref:11"><a href="#fn:11" class="footnote">11</a></sup> model for MARC data that can be incorporated into linked data with RDF/XML/OWL interoperability. Second: the whole point of linked data is to borrow gratuitously. Bibliographic data can’t be borrowed until it exists on the semantic web. It’s almost like this is the first step to translating legacy data or something.</p>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li>To achieve true library linked data, individual MARC elements must be turned into actionable entities.</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<p>Uh, http://bibframe.org/vocab/. A surprising amount of MARC data is actually recursion. I’d be frightened of a schema that attempts to turn every indivudal MARC datum into a linked data resource.</p>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Creating actionable entities will require new kinds of processes and services that mostly don’t yet exist.</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<p>/me pulls out hair. No.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>MARC data is semantically imbued already. Semantics in physical documents are inferred by things such as space, place, and code. To illustrate this, we’ll continue with <em>Critical Library Instruction</em>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/critical-library-instruction-theories-and-methods/oclc/440562980">OCLC #:440562980</a>. Though today’s catalogers are more familiar with the OCLC or their specific ILS’s workform for MARC data, the old MARC bibliographic workform places the most important data points near the top left of the document (because that’s how we read them as humans). Any guesses as to what they are? If you guessed author and title, pat yourself on the back. Known item searches are one major function of the library catalog and those two data points are the primary ways of knowing an item from a bibliographic standpoint. We’ll look at those two elements in the MARC record and dissect their semantic meaning.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>245 10 $a Critical library instruction : $b theories and methods / $c Edited by Maria T. Accardi, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The first question when students or uninitiated eyes look at that string is “what the heck do those numbers mean?!” That’s where <a href="http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic">the code</a> comes in. Each of those numbers, as well as the delimiters has a specific semantic meaning that dictates what the string means and how it can be used in the MARC standard as well as how it can be displayed with a MARC-compliant OPAC. The Library of Congress MARC website (and OCLC’s version of it) is the cipher to making the MARC data human-readable. If we go to the entry for 245, we learn that it is the Title Statement. Without even consulting RDA or AACR2, we can infer that it means “this is the title of the thing.”</p>
<p>Okay! So then the title is…$a Critical library instruction : $b theories and methods / $c Edited by Maria T. Accardi, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier.? I thought the title was just Critical library instruction: theories and methods. The cipher gives the meaning to the delimiters as well: $a is the title, $b is the remainder of title, and $c is the statement of responsibility. That’s library jargon, of course–it’s the title, subtitle, and author/editor statement. You can see already that MARC has recursion. The statement of responsibility is taken care of in another element field, while “245” and $a seem to mean the same thing. That’s why we colloquially refer to it as “245a.” The semantic distinction between types and forms of titles are bibliographically specific and require the kind of training that catalogers have in order to parse–it requires knowing the ins and outs of particular formats, what kinds of metadata information those particular formats provide and where, and how to make that metadata work for the user in a MARC-compliant OPAC. To try and say that in a shorter way: the user doesn’t care about the difference between “Title,” “Title proper,” and, “Remainder of title,” but that level of granularity is necessary for the cataloger to know for computer parsing, as well as for the librarian to know in order to be able to provide access by unique bibliographic edition<sup id="fnref:12"><a href="#fn:12" class="footnote">12</a></sup>.</p>
<p>We express the semantic meaning imbued in MARC data in a different way than an RDF triple word. Turns out humans can mentally manipulate that data to crosswalk it to another semantic model. Consider:</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Subject</th>
<th>Predicate</th>
<th>Object</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>OCLC 440562980</td>
<td>245 $a</td>
<td>Critical library instruction</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>OCLC 440562980</td>
<td>245 $b</td>
<td>theories and methods</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>OCLC 440562980</td>
<td>245 $c</td>
<td>Edited by Maria T. Accardi, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><br /></p>
<p>Now, a crude method of imbuing “Semantic Web” semantic meaning to these triples, particularly the objects, would be to link them to http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bd245.html. However, this still requires a ton of human mediation to make meaning of. Using BIBFRAME, I’m going to make them closer to machine readable.</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Subject</th>
<th>Predicate</th>
<th>Object</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/440562980</td>
<td><a href="http://bibframe.org/vocab/title">bf:title</a></td>
<td>Critical library instruction</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/440562980</td>
<td><a href="http://bibframe.org/vocab/subtitle">bf:subtitle</a></td>
<td>theories and methods</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/440562980</td>
<td><a href="http://bibframe.org/vocab/responsibilityStatement">bf:responsibilityStatement</a></td>
<td>Edited by Maria T. Accardi, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><sup id="fnref:13"><a href="#fn:13" class="footnote">13</a></sup></p>
<p>Linked data and MARC data aren’t so far off after all. It just requires people who are fluent in the two models and languages to be able to translate. Perhaps our existing tools need updating by someone fluent in both, or we do really need new tools. If you asked me? We need funding and personpower to train people and translate the data through batch processes. Of course, this is a problem because library technologists and cataloging departments especially are woefully understaffed and underfunded in North America, if not in other places.</p>
<h1 id="collocation-or-a-record-by-any-other-name">Collocation, Or: A record by any other name</h1>
<p>The library catalog has two critical functions: to find and locate<sup id="fnref:14"><a href="#fn:14" class="footnote">14</a></sup> a document with a known author, title, or subject; to show what inventory the library has (collocation, in other words)<sup id="fnref:12:1"><a href="#fn:12" class="footnote">12</a></sup>. The record in a library catalog stands as a surrogate to represent an actual document that is in the library’s collection. In other words, records contain metadata about a particular object. Metadata is data is data, which can be linked in the semantic web–the primary application of linked data in libraries, as it currently stands. As Tom said above, data still needs to be bundled. We can imbue all the semantic meaning we want to a particular datum like Emily Drabinski, but it doesn’t mean anything until the datum is collocated with other data that sufficiently describes the particular resource in question.</p>
<p>To use an example from above, <em>Critical Library Instruction</em> has three main contributors: Emily Drabinski, Alana Kumbier, and Maria T. Accardi. Those three statements independent of each other have particular meaning, but do not make sense as a unit until they are collocated in a single place and presented to humans in a way that makes cognitive sense. Turns out we have a conceptual model for doing that kind of collocation work that is centuries old: the bibliographic record. A surrogate is only as useful as the information it provides the user. Either end of a linked data concept of a “thing” does not prove useful to us: a single RDF triple needs other statements to infer meaning, and linked RDF triples without an human epistemological framework don’t mean anything either. Some technologists will tell you that linked data is primarily for computers–this viewpoint misses the fact that computers are tools that humans use; therefore, the tool is only useful if a human can make meaning out of its function. Only in an epistemologically valid framework will the immense benefit of machine inference benefit us.</p>
<p>Enter the record. Linked data gives us the ability to decentralize information about resources and get away from the model of a centralized relational database as a mode of retrieving and displaying information. Linked data also gives us the ability to take semantic shortcuts to devise methods and applications that 1) can be localized in almost infinite ways and 2) allow us to break out of library authority and make full use of the information available to us today as users of the internet. The tools and technology behind the record may become linked data-based, but at the end of the day the user still wants to be able to find what they want with ease, whether the item is known or not. The role of the record in achieving this is pivotal; if we provide a cognitive model that gives too much or too little information, presents the information in a way that is non-intuitive, or requires significant effort to retrieve information, the tool is useless<sup id="fnref:15"><a href="#fn:15" class="footnote">15</a></sup>. Users appreciate the collocation of the information they want about a thing with ease of effort. Think about when you search for the menu of a restaurant. User experience + web architecture research will give you a certain amount of clicks or seconds before the user gives up. The same is true of user studies on library catalogs. How we bundle information to present to users is arguably <strong>more</strong> important than making sure everything is linked; collocating this information in a succinct and useful record remains the primary and best method of presenting a user with information.</p>
<p>In other words: linked data means nothing without proper recording. Stop pretending librarians are held back by the concept of a record. You are wrong.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Mr. Tennant is hardly the first to say this. He just happens to be the one I read today.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>These words sound harsh. However, technologists tend to look over librarians’ heads, even when they are <a href="2015/07/03/teaching-unsexy.html">library friendly</a>. I am truly more amenable when we’re actually working on a project together. Another note: the shadow conference mentioned in that post was literally the best of my life. I will forever be indebted to how it has shaped the people and things I know. It was not a Bad Thing, it just had the drippings of outside technological social structures as a part of it.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>And I need not recount how the card catalog was built on the strong documentation of the dictionary catalog.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4">
<p>I’m always in awe of how many people don’t understand transfer protocols. Web technology uses the hypertext transfer protocol (http://) to connect individual computers to a domain on another computer, or another site on a particular domain. It’s why “link” is common terminology–they are “hyperlinks” based on the of the hypertext markup language (html) to connect disparate files on different computers around the world. It was one of two useful weeks in my “technology 101” in library school because I learned more about technology for ftp (file transfer protocol) &amp; sftp that I would never have learned otherwise. (The other useful week was Unix, which let me play around on IU’s SLIS server with sftp &amp; secure document storage. It should not surprise you that these were weeks 14-16).&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:5">
<p>One of the reasons so many technologists hate linked data is becuase of its current nonsensical <a href="http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-rdf-xml/images/Original_RDF_graph.gif">graphical representation</a>. Thanks to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative for that photo.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:5" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:6">
<p>Refer to Ruth’s document for an understanding of this format’s relevance. I learned the RDF conceptual model in RDF/XML and it is not the easiest thing for uninitiated eyes to understand.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:6" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:7">
<p><strong>Technically</strong> Emily Drabinski is not the creator of that website, but that is because of the misguided idea of what creator means on the web. This is by far my least favorite thing about Dublin Core terms.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:7" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:8">
<p>I’ve left out the namespaces. In a real document those are required. Refer to Ruth.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:8" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:9">
<p>I created <code class="highlighter-rouge">_:ed</code> so that I could use it multiple times in this document without creating a permanent resource identifier. Ruth talks about this, I think.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:9" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:10">
<p>Obvious, right? Not to a binary computer.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:10" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:11">
<p>Do not get me wrong: <strong>BIBFRAME is awful.</strong>&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:11" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:12">
<p>Cutter, Charles A. Rules for a dictionary catalog, by Charles A. Cutter, fourth edition, rewritten. Washington. UNT Digital Library. http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1048/. Accessed March 22, 2016.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:12" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a>&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:12:1" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;<sup>2</sup></a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:13">
<p>I’m not fluent in BIBFRAME and it’s not a 1:1 MARC model, but I <em>think</em> that is a correct usage of bf:responsibilityStatement. I’m not going back to check.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:13" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:14">
<p>Find, select, identify, obtain if you’re a FRBR-er.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:14" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:15">
<p>Let’s be real: OPACs already make these mistakes. That doesn’t make these assertions any less critical for library technology based on linked data.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:15" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Listen up, preachers of linked data in libraries:Ontological Temporality: FRBR and music2016-03-14T00:00:00+00:002016-03-14T00:00:00+00:00http://kyleshockey.info/ontological-temporality<blockquote>
<p>“However, it does not matter if 2 percent or 98 percent of your instances will exhibit the characteristic in question; the model must solve the problem in a way that is valid for all of your data.
-Karen Coyle, <a href="http://www.kcoyle.net/beforeAndAfter/index.html">FRBR before and after: a look at our bibliographic models</a>, p. 135.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Usually in my day to day work in graduate school (where I was a musical score and a sound recordings cataloger), I was/still am perturbed by the basic failure of bibliographic description structures to comprehend the ontological<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup> being of any musically related non-monograph. LCSH confuses the actual content’s form for aboutness, which narrows the music cataloger’s ability to give an actual subject analysis<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">2</a></sup> Much in the same way the FRBR model can’t encompass the ways of being that music exhibits. Maybe I have the bias of having thought extensively about the ontological being of music in a different context: copyright law.</p>
<p>The best illustration of the points I will come to make through this post can be demonstrated by Joanna Demers:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Consider “The Star Spangled Banner.” You can own a copy of its sheet music, sing it at the opening of a local baseball game, and listen to Jimi Hendrix’s famous Woodstock performance. You can physically hold a recording of Hendrix’s rendition if you find it at a used record shop, and you can also download this same recording as intangible, digital data through a file-sharing service like Kazaa or Morpheus. All these permutations qualify as “The Star Spangled Banner” but possess different commercial and legal statues. There is no single definitive form of a piece of music in the way that there is one first edition of A Tale of Two Cities from which subsequent editions have been copied.
Joanna Demers, <a href="http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/steal_this_music/">Steal this music: how intellectual property law affects music creativity</a>, p. 18.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Demers’s point is that all of those modes of musical being are subject to different, overlapping, and sometimes at-odds copyrights under current US law. But it is a point that bears repeating for the sake of the bibliographic universe. The ontological multiplicity of a musical work, combined with the temporal issue of determining ontologically prior expression and manifestation of a work make FRBR an absolutely unfit model for musical data handled by libraries<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote">3</a></sup>. I am, of course, not the first one to say that<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote">4</a></sup><sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote">5</a></sup><sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote">6</a></sup>. However, even the critiques of the FRBR model from the music world still deal primarily with academic forms: classical and jazz. These critiques also do not think over a long term temporality–the critique of jazz only implicates the act of improvisation-as-composition, while the Variations document makes only minor edits to what appears to be a mostly in line system. These critiques do not take into account the progenation of the work, nor do they take into account how interrelated the family of a particular FRBR musical ‘work’ is conceived of by users.<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote">7</a></sup><sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8" class="footnote">8</a></sup> To provide examples, I will recount to you some anecdotal methods of musical compositions I’ve been a part of or witnessed as a performer with composer friends and colleagues inside and outside of the academy.</p>
<h3 id="example-1">Example 1</h3>
<p>A composition student is working on a musical piece for an end of term project that will eventually be workshopped into a published musical score. The student writes the work in musical notation while fleshing out the parts using a single hand at the piano. More notation is worked out on the score after a rehearsal with the student orchestra, which is recorded. The composer later calls the debut with the local professional philharmonic the first and definitive recording.</p>
<p>What’s the expression and what’s the manifestation? Is the expression representative of the work and/or the manifestation? Do we care about anything prior to the professional publication of the score? How do we deal with multiple instances in the mind of the library versus the mind of the composer? Why does the library have what should be archival material? How does the archival material differ from the library material in the bibliographic universe - same “thing,” described differently.</p>
<h3 id="example-2">Example 2</h3>
<p>A jazz composition student writes words to throw over Rhythm changes at the last minute for an end-of-semester performance. The lyrics are later tweaked slightly and released on this composer’s debut album with a significantly different medium of performance (quintet vs. big band).</p>
<p>Where does the new work begin and where does “I’ve got rhythm” end? How does the whole/part relationship function first within the recording of the semester performance and then within the aggregate work that is the album? What about the written chart, which is an entirely different ball game.</p>
<h3 id="example-3">Example 3</h3>
<p>A local punk band plays a show at your library with a song titled “Up the Stax.” No one recorded it. The title is on the set list on their website and on your program, which is deposited in your institutional archive.</p>
<p>If a work is expressed and no one is there to manifest it, does it really exist? It exists in the bibliographic universe according to the FRBR report, which doesn’t necessarily require all instances of group 1 entities to be a valid instance of the data model. However: this entity also exists in the bibliographic universe as a group 3 entity, “event.” Works can be <b>related</b> to events, but works cannot <b>be</b> events. The Event-as-Work problem shows up a lot in conceptual performance art, which, like music, is mostly video/audio recorded in terms of manifestation. An artist will tell you that your new library manifestation is a literal instance of a new expression (read: E and M are one in the same, every time).</p>
<p>This goes on and on. We can ask multiple questions about every instance of musical composition anywhere ever. I needn’t say more about how unfit FRBR is for music and musical materials. If this is supposed to be the model of the bibliographic universe for the future of cataloging, quite a lot is going to be missing. Quite a lot is going to be undescribable even if collected. It’s another instance of <a href="/2016/03/09/cold-spaghetti.html">beating square pegs on round holes</a>. Music catalogers can and will find a different way to deal with this issue. I’m not saying we’ve been right in the past (hello Western classical music-as-ideal), but music is infinitely more complex in the linked data world than your average monograph.</p>
<h3 id="example-35">Example 3.5</h3>
<p>A work takes four minutes and thirty-three seconds of tacet performance. Expressions and manifestations do not functionally differ from one another but each expression is in a different place with different people in the audience at different times and the manifestations only differ in terms of the “background noise,” which is only functionally part of the work because theoretically the composer said so.</p>
<p>;)</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>I am referring exclusively in this post to the metaphysics definition, not the computer/information science definition.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>I often ask catalogers some variation of the following question: “Have you ever met someone that catalogs Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with ‘Deafness – Psychological effects’ as a subject?”&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>For clarity, since the terms in this sentence come from my previous research in musical copyright law: ontological multiplicity refers to the multiple modes of being that a particular musical work can be expressed and manifested in [^3.5] while ontological temporality and the notion of ontologically prior refer to the timeline through which the work/expression/manifestation comes into being–the ontologically prior, then, is a progenitor of a later derivative work/expression/manifestation.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4">
<p>Coyle, <i>FRBR</i>, 120.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:5">
<p>Raymond Schmidt, “Composing in real time: jazz performances as ‘works’ in the FRBR model,” <i>Cataloging and Classification Quarterly</i> 50, no. 5-7 (June 2012), 653-659.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:5" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:6">
<p>Jenn Riley, Caitlin hunter, Chris Colvard, and Alex Berry. <i>Definition of a FRBR-based metadata model for the Indiana University Variations3 project,</i> 2007. Retrieved from http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/variations3/docs/v3FRBRreport.pdf. I was an expert user of the Variations2 system and was cataloging at the university when the progeny of Variations3, the Avalon project, was undergoing early implementation.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:6" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:7">
<p>Coyle is right, in my humble opinion, to say that the musical user community most strongly identifies with the idea of the FRBR work. It’s the rest of the model that is wack.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:7" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:8">
<p>Coyle is also right to identify the aggregate as a massive problem. Turns out the rate of aggregate works in the music community is absurdly higher than anywhere else (think: every sound recording is an aggregate work).&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:8" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>“However, it does not matter if 2 percent or 98 percent of your instances will exhibit the characteristic in question; the model must solve the problem in a way that is valid for all of your data. -Karen Coyle, FRBR before and after: a look at our bibliographic models, p. 135.In defense of the human: an outline2016-03-12T00:00:00+00:002016-03-12T00:00:00+00:00http://kyleshockey.info/in-defense<p>Preface: This is a very rough, early, un/der-researched outline for a likely-book length document I may or may not write. The goals and values of the semantic web are not the same as the goals and values of librarians and information professionals with any inclination toward social, economic, human justice. The future of the catalog, as it is regularly called, extends the reach of the surveillance state with librarians as willing, labor-surplus providing participants.</p>
<p>THESIS-ISH: The technology underwriting the semantic web and the “smart bot” automation end goal runs counter to justice-oriented librarianship [like Samek 2001]. We should be critical of where, when, why, and how much metadata we build on the premise of the Semantic web for the sake of our humanity in a dehumanizing global automated capitalism, for the safety of our users and communities, and for the deployment of librarianship against the invasive surveillance capitalist state and for reparative justice.</p>
<p><a href="/assets/other/defense.pdf" target="_blank">see more here.</a></p>Preface: This is a very rough, early, un/der-researched outline for a likely-book length document I may or may not write. The goals and values of the semantic web are not the same as the goals and values of librarians and information professionals with any inclination toward social, economic, human justice. The future of the catalog, as it is regularly called, extends the reach of the surveillance state with librarians as willing, labor-surplus providing participants.Cold Spaghetti, Cold Spaghetti2016-03-09T00:00:00+00:002016-03-09T00:00:00+00:00http://kyleshockey.info/cold-spaghetti<blockquote>
<p>The bells explain what they’ve been lacking all along
They were disorganized and that was what was wrong</p>
<p>-They Might Be Giants, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSEQ0kMt-0k">“The Bells Are Ringing”</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The link between RDA and FRBR has always been a bit fuzzy for me. Reading the following passage in Karen Coyle’s book made something click for me in an alarming way.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What is notable about FRBR, and in some respects RDA also, is that it makes numerous assumptions that were never tested. Because FRBR was couched in terms of a known technology [entity-relation model], it was assumed to be technically valid and perhaps even implementable, in spite of the declarations of technology neutrality. Yet no implementations of FRBR, even on a small set of test data, were developed as part of the FRBR Study Group’s process. RDA is therefore a cataloging standard based on an unproven conceptual model. The technology that would support them, is at the time of this writing [2015?], still unavailable.</p>
<p>-Karen Coyle, <a href="http://www.kcoyle.net/beforeAndAfter/index.html">(<i>FRBR before and after: a look at our bibliographic models</i></a>, p. 68.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We screwed up, often and badly. We’re not fixing it, really. And no, I am not talking about the retention and continued of MARC as librarianship’s primary metadata standard, which Coyle regards as “[q]uite possibly the greatest mistake in the last two to three decades” (p. 51).</p>
<p>Interoperability has always been some form of making the peg fit the whole by manipulating the shape of the peg and the shape of the hole to varying degrees based on a project’s context. This metaphor is so applicable to just about everything that it is essentially how we conceive of concept modeling and the alteration of worldviews in cognitive science. In light of <a href="http://2016.code4lib.org/Architecture-is-politics-the-power-and-the-perils-of-systems-design">Andreas Orphanides</a>’s assertion that metadata is a social justice issue, we have failed our users so much<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. We have bludgeoned the hole with a badly-shaped peg using countless dollars, labor hours, papers, conferences, hours of coding, years [decades?] of time while yelling, “LOOK, LIBRARY DATA MATTERS AND IS TOTALLY RELEVANT!” That’s why interoperability guiding the databases that underlie most, if not all, of the library’s activities is passed on through this frustrating cabal-like induction-through multi-trial ceremony that is cataloging and metadata classes and/or ad-hoc “put this literal string here” on-the-fly training<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">2</a></sup>.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Teaching RDA in MARC to noobs is hard! Like it doesn&#39;t make sense. It jumps all over! Record all this info on M, except a little of W&amp;E too!</p>&mdash; Amber Billey (@justbilley) <a href="https://twitter.com/justbilley/status/707001167788777476">March 8, 2016</a></blockquote>
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<p>The FRBR-RDA-MARC relationship reminds me of a model used to describe the affordances and hinderances of trying to create legal, free cultural objects on the web in our current copyright regime<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote">3</a></sup>. <a href="http://www.lessig.org/about/">Lawrence Lessig</a> developed an idea through his early books, now enshrined in the structure of the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/">Creative Commons License</a>, about the interacive, intertwined levels involved in ensuring the spectrum of “copyrights” (or degrees of copyrightness, based on the license) is represented across the various technologies (i.e. contexts) of their domain. When trying to describe what the alphabet soup that facilitates surrogate modeling (read: cataloging), we fail to distinguish the participation of each acronym in the constellated network of bibliographic control, from the philosophical concept to the display constant in a catalog<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote">4</a></sup> I will write about this at length in the upcoming blog post mentioned in note three, but the MARC record as it stands is an ad-hoc amalgamation of purpose and the library catalog as it stands fails at most things because it tries to do everything<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote">5</a></sup>. With that in mind, let’s clear up what these things are and do:</p>
<blockquote>
<ol>
<li>FRBR is a <b>conceptual model</b>.</li>
<li>RDA is a <b>data standard/code/rule set</b><sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote">6</a></sup>.</li>
<li>MARC is… <b>a lot of things</b>.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>MARC, like the library catalog, is so abstracted both conceptually and physically from what it was designed to do in its original context that it really isn’t easy to pin down. In the constellated network I am trying to illuminate for you, MARC is a coding language. The MARC record, a byproduct of the original purpose of machine readable cataloging, is a structural format (a container?) for the data considered valid and relevant in the bibliographic universe according to the specifications in RDA. Because of the semantic meanings implied by the coded data fields of MARC, it’s also…a data standard. This is a large part of why bludgeoning MARC with the RDA toolkit is so difficult!<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote">7</a></sup> If you don’t use it regularly, I urge you to try the MARC to RDA mappings and the RDA to MARC mappings in the toolkit some time. Undoubtedly one of the hardest tools to use in that toolkit (aside from perhaps the rulebook itself). Where does FRBR come in? It’s a conceptual model that is supposed to underpin RDA, which specifies rules for data construction and inclusion, which can then be thrown at MARC like cold spaghetti.</p>
<p>At another time I can illuminate the interrelationships between the things above. What you need to know for this argument is that the conceptual model of FRBR has an intellectual history that is heavily influenced by (you guessed it) MARC (Clarke 2015). In our own little and not so little ways, MARC still pervades all our services. People don’t Boolean search any more (unless you’re me). People do not understand the vocabularies required to properly execute a subject search in our catalogs, which is the primary collocation method through which people engage in an unknown item search (and people want to do unknown item searches way more than we think). Even when we have new, rich, expansive possibilities for what to do with our data, we are so busy manipulating the shiny new holes to fit our heavy, misshapen peg–which continues to have absurd amounts of resources thrown at it while its affordances and extremly numerous limitations are known many times over–that we forget to (or do not have the ability or desire to) demonstrate to the money why MARC is such an unimaginable burden and waste.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VflIdXP46RU">Are we having fun yet?</a></p>
<p>stuff i used</p>
<p>Billey, A. [@justbilley] Teaching RDA in MARC to noobs is hard! Like it doesn’t make sense. It jumps all over! Record all this info on M, except a little of W &amp; E too! [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/justbilley/status/707001167788777476.</p>
<p>Clarke, R.I. (2015). “Breaking records: the history of bibliographic records and their influence in conceptualizing bibliographic data.” <i>Cataloging &amp; Classification Quarterly 53</i>: 3-4, 286-302.</p>
<p>Coyle, K. (2016). <i>FRBR before and after: a look at our bibliographic models.</i> Chicago: ALA Editions.</p>
<p>Orphanides, A. (2016, March 9). Architecture is politics: the powers and perils of systems design. Presented at code4lib 2016, Philadelphia, PA, USA.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>In a piece in press, I argue that American librarianship is focused on intellectual freedom and neutrality to the exclusion of social justice. This plays into design decisions regarding the rules, tools, systems, standards, and governance of institutions tasked with developing and maintaining library catalogs.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>OR: outsourced to corporate vendors who don’t give a shit about your users because they just want to sell books…using labor extracted from the people who fit the previous two descriptions.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>Another blog post is forthcoming about how people who think about metadata in and around libraries use technical and conceptual language very poorly, which results in us not understanding 1) what a thing is, 2) what a thing is supposed to be doing, 3) what the thing is actually doing. It contains a lot more Coyle and some other reading that has struck me as of late.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4">
<p>I chose to say display constant instead of stopping at the literal string that a cataloger inputs into the MARC workform because the MARC codes have specific semantic meanings that tell the user things, particularly with regard to subject access and entity relationships.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:5">
<p>Not to overindulge the “make it more like G–gle” problem, but people do not think the G is everything because everything happens on its dot com search engine–that is one specific thing better than any else of its kind. They think it’s everything because it’s a multi-national, multi-billion dollar hypercapitalist blight that has its hands in most tech pies through <u>other</u> technologies.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:5" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:6">
<p>Calling this a data standard [implied: model] is a misnomer. It does not specify structural format [in this case the MARC record] of the data like a data standard typically does. RDA itself switches between the terms “code” and “standard” (which are not even close to the same thing).&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:6" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:7">
<p>I will never utter the following words again, so listen up: Michael Gorman was…right…about RDA being a debacle, but not for the reasons he specified. The Anglo-American Cataloging Rules were very clear about what they were and what they did. It’s right there in the name: Rules.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:7" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>The bells explain what they’ve been lacking all along They were disorganized and that was what was wrong -They Might Be Giants, “The Bells Are Ringing”New things!2015-11-20T00:00:00+00:002015-11-20T00:00:00+00:00http://kyleshockey.info/new-things<p>For those of you who didn’t hear already, I accepted a position as a Resource Description Specialist at <a href="http://www.american.edu/library/">“The” American University Libraries</a> in Washington, DC. I am so excited to start this new chapter of my life in an exciting new place. I’m currently in DC hunting for apartments, but in December I’ll be honest to god employed. How about that? More writing will come soon but I am pretty occupied at the moment with this move. See you soon, Atlantic seaboard.</p>For those of you who didn’t hear already, I accepted a position as a Resource Description Specialist at “The” American University Libraries in Washington, DC. I am so excited to start this new chapter of my life in an exciting new place. I’m currently in DC hunting for apartments, but in December I’ll be honest to god employed. How about that? More writing will come soon but I am pretty occupied at the moment with this move. See you soon, Atlantic seaboard.Of Course I’ll Be Fine: A Response2015-11-10T00:00:00+00:002015-11-10T00:00:00+00:00http://kyleshockey.info/of-course<p>I am very grateful to <a href="https://twitter.com/librarianmer">Meredith Farkas</a> who took on my <a href="http://librarianburnout.com/2015/10/13/crawling-to-the-starting-line-a-guest-post-from-kyle-shockey/">library burnout story</a> and was gracious enough to write a <a href="http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2015/11/09/library-job-search-burnout-what-librarians-can-do/">full response</a> that is great in many ways. Since I initially read it, comments have appeared and the whole post is worth a response to certain points.</p>
<p>The short answer to Meredith’s title question: absolutely not. That’s why I am trying to bring things to light by speaking and encouraging others who have the ability and desire to speak as well. I don’t know how much emotional outrage will actually change hiring and employment practices, but people noticing is a start. Nor, I should mention, is this a problem unique to LIS, academia, or much American employment practice broadly. The first job search is brutal for anyone who isn’t a unicorn in their field (insert subrant about millenial bashing here). This goes more for people whose jobs are pink collar (nursing, education, librarianship), not supported by capitalism (humanities graduates), and/or generated as a result of hypercapitalism (fast food, service industries). What happens in our little LIS domain is a microcosm for the broader practice of capitalistic employment. That said, we can change. We can pound away at the cracks in the wall.</p>
<p>But more importantly to this and <a href="http://info-fetishist.org/2015/10/28/i-have-no-title-for-this/">other</a> informal writings surrounding my situation: this is not my problem. It’s all of ours. I can only steer the direction of this conversation to where it needs to be if people get it in their minds that this is not an isolated incident and it is not an incident of personal failures. “It will be okay” ; “It gets better” ; “Something will work out” ; “I went through that too” – offering these platitudes to job searchers, students, and young professionals isn’t just tone deaf, it’s exactly the problem I am speaking out against. I know that all of those platitudes apply to me. I’m a white man with a technically-foucsed Master’s degree and (now) a middle class support system. Of course I am going to be fine. In fact, I may be employed in academic librarianship by the first of the year due to a recent turn of events. That is just so not the point.</p>
<p>The first point of Meredith’s that I want to address is the final one: “In the big picture, we should advocate to decrease the number of people going into LIS programs.” Absolutely. Not. Dear friend of this blog <a href="http://twitter.com/oksveta">Sveta</a> and I put this pretty simply in a recent informal conversation: there is more than enough work for LIS grads. There isn’t monetary support to hire people to do this work at a living wage. If I’m being blunt, that’s not actually library school’s problem. Sure, I have concerns over sending new librarians to school–the abuse of young professionals, the lack of funding, societal views of librarians as secondary and/or useless, student debt control–but I do not think that library schools have the ethical imperative to turn young professionals-in-training away. Charge less or nothing? Provide financial aid? Fight back against administrations? Yes. Enrollment scruitny? Not quite. More often than not the exclusionary tactics used in these kinds of admissions decisions are decidedly in service to white supremacy and against actual diversity. Literally everyone but the unicorn loses when we go this route. Instead, we must consider an organized resistance to oppressive funding structures. Or, as my friend Myron stresses:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">my take on <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/radlibchat?src=hash">#radlibchat</a> + <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/critlib?src=hash">#critlib</a> + related discussions is that LIS needs to think of itself more strongly in terms of labour.</p>&mdash; Myron G (@Bibliocracy) <a href="https://twitter.com/Bibliocracy/status/664186479648862208">November 10, 2015</a></blockquote>
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<p>This does not provide a short term fix to what many see as an LIS graduate oversupply, but I am not concerned with fixing a short-term problem for the reasons listed above. The damage done in the interim as a whole is just too great for me to fathom. I want you to direct your energy to something that works for good instead of making certain individuals <em>feel</em> good.</p>
<p>Now, the second assertion I want to take on is one in the beginning paragraphs: I am not rare. I’m privileged, sure. I am by far not rare. Holding me up as a model example and asserting that I am somehow different than people who haven’t received acolades as traditional as mine is just flat out wrong. Many highly trained, extremely diversely experienced, extremely intelligent and resourceful people come out of LIS programs and do not get jobs. <a href="https://medium.com/@Wribrarian/hungry-fbfbe0e5fe85">Stacie Williams</a> writes excellently about this. I have the privilege to speak up; I have the privilege to still eat and have a roof over my head with income only coming from an unsteady, “sharing economy” service job with a company I seriously loathe from an ethics, labor, and capitalist standpoint. Many have confided in me about similar situations, various abuses as a young and/or para- professional and library student without the ability to speak up. But to call me rare because I “did it right” again backs up the very white supremacist, structural issues I want to destroy. You’re not helping by individuating and making it about my story rather than the structural issue.</p>
<p>All this said, I think some of the points Meredith makes are worthwhile and achievable points for LIS practitioners to work on while still fighting the long-range fight. Read it, scrutinize it, take it to heart. We can disagree and still work towards good together.</p>I am very grateful to Meredith Farkas who took on my library burnout story and was gracious enough to write a full response that is great in many ways. Since I initially read it, comments have appeared and the whole post is worth a response to certain points.Crawling to the Starting Line - Guest Post on Librarian Burnout2015-10-13T00:00:00+00:002015-10-13T00:00:00+00:00http://kyleshockey.info/crawling-guest-post<p>Today I had the great fortune to have my story about burnout in library school and the post-school job search featured on my dear friend Maria Accardi’s <a href="http://librarianburnout.com/2015/10/13/crawling-to-the-starting-line-a-guest-post-from-kyle-shockey/">Librarian Burnout</a> blog. I think it’s great that the topic has gained so much traction on twitter today following my post, but I worry about the long-term solvency of employment change. I have been vocal about as much today. The amount of private and public reaffirmation from other students and young professionals as well as the amount of light bulbs that went off with older professionals when people started sharing gives me heart that 1. we don’t have to be silent or take shit from employers and that 2. there are sympathetic people who want to be on our side and who want to change employment practices for the better.</p>
<p>But as my friend <a href="https://twitter.com/rachelmfleming">Rachel</a> mentioned in a conversation, change in higher ed (and in general) is hard and we are tired. Not just us here at the bottom of the ladder begging for scraps, but those of us who want to get the scrap feeders into real jobs with benefits. Nor is this problem limited to academic librarianship, though that’s where 85% of my applications are going. In my own life, I just don’t care anymore. I’ll do something for decent money and leave librarianship in the dust if I have to.</p>
<p>Maybe I just wasn’t meant for this in the first place.</p>Today I had the great fortune to have my story about burnout in library school and the post-school job search featured on my dear friend Maria Accardi’s Librarian Burnout blog. I think it’s great that the topic has gained so much traction on twitter today following my post, but I worry about the long-term solvency of employment change. I have been vocal about as much today. The amount of private and public reaffirmation from other students and young professionals as well as the amount of light bulbs that went off with older professionals when people started sharing gives me heart that 1. we don’t have to be silent or take shit from employers and that 2. there are sympathetic people who want to be on our side and who want to change employment practices for the better.